In an airport or other travel terminal there are many passengers arriving to take flights or other voyages. Processing all the passengers is a time consuming exercise which often means a lot of queuing for the passengers. Passengers travel with documentation which is used to identify them and enables them to pass security controls and the like. Authenticating and checking the passenger documentation is an important part of the security process and has to be fulfilled in order for passengers to be allowed to travel. Improvements in this respect are always being sought.
Efforts have been taken to find automatic ways of authenticating and verifying documents. These include character based text recognition and document recognition processes which match characteristics or texts in the document with equivalent information in a database to authenticate a particular passenger.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,970,484 discloses a system for retrieving a document in a database by transmitting a user request through a fax machine. A search occurs in a database and the fax machine then sends the matching document back to the user. The method comprises searching for text similar to a sample text using character recognition and specific search parameters. A weighting technique is also applied to some of the sample text.
US2006/085477 discloses a system for retrieving electronic documents related to captured images through handheld devices, laptops etc and for providing a user with the retrieved electronic documents. The method also comprises searching for a document by using any image capture device to retrieve the document that matches the search, from a specific database. This is carried out by determining a set of text patterns and building a search query based on the text patterns.
US2002/037097 discloses a system for providing an improved purchase process for a customer by retrieving searched bills from a database and by processing a sale after authentication of the match between the customer and the matching bill. The search is accomplished by using barcode searching, optical recognition, and comparison of patterns.
US2009/177653 discloses a system for searching for text stored in a scanned image and for generating an electronic copy of a document based on the search. This is accomplished by scanning an original document, extracting keywords and searching for additional information based on the keywords.
The above-mentioned prior art documents solve some of the problems associated with authenticating and verifying passengers prior to travel. However, there are still flaws in the above described methods which remain to be overcome.